Not all of Purdue’s scheduling wishes granted

Volleyball coach Dave Shondell is one of many Purdue coaches that did not get all of their wishes when changes were made to the Big Ten scheduling formats.
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As each of the coaches’ groups from the Big Ten presented its plan about how their sports should proceed with the addition of Maryland and Rutgers, finding a consensus was nearly impossible.

At least that seemed to be the case according to a sampling of Purdue coaches.

Doug Schreiber preferred divisions in baseball. Matt Painter wants to explore the idea of protected rivalries in men’s basketball, an idea that’s been floated around before the Terrapins and the Scarlet Knights were being considered for membership. Dave Shondell isn’t a fan of playing his main volleyball rival — Indiana — twice in four days.

Women’s soccer has already made a change and the first match hasn’t been played. The sport will use a round-robin regular-season schedule (13 games) this season but decided to reduce the number to 11 in 2015 because of RPI considerations.

“I’m excited to play everyone,” Purdue coach Rob Klatte said. “I think you get a true champion and with 20 regular-season games, it is something that does eat up a large portion of the schedule. But just having the opportunity to play everyone is fantastic for our sport.”

For now, the plan is ready to go when the new era of Big Ten athletics begins in August. How much of it will be tweaked won’t be known until after the first year is completed.

Painter prefers building protected rivals into the regular-season schedule, playing two games annually. In Purdue’s case, it’s Indiana. But not every basketball program has a natural basketball rivalry.

“You have Michigan-Michigan State, Indiana-Purdue, but where are the true rivals in men’s basketball after that?” Painter asked. “There’s a couple of them, but they’re not huge. I think it would be tough for the common fan to answer that question.”

Protected rivalries in basketball likely won’t happen, but Painter remains optimistic that the Boilermakers and the Hoosiers can play twice a year — once in the nonconference season — when the Big Ten rotation calls for one league game. They’ll play twice in the upcoming league season.

“It’s something that we would entertain,” Painter said. “With the ACC-Big Ten Challenge and the Crossroads Classic, I don’t know if we can get it as part of our Crossroads Classic when we don’t play two times.”

Volleyball will stay with a 20-match conference schedule, although Shondell prefers 18. Purdue will play seven opponents twice and six teams once.

“Fourteen teams is a difficult number to work within a 20-match schedule,” Shondell said. “The coaches agreed, to some extent, we wanted to stay at 20 matches. It’s probably the best we have to work with right now. I’m sure there will be discussions after the season if we want to go that way again.”

The one difference compared to past seasons is teams playing their travel partners twice in less than a week. Purdue’s travel partner is also its in-state rival.

“I don’t think this is good,” Shondell said. “That hurts the better team. You open yourself up to get snakebit playing a team twice in that short amount of time. It will be interesting to see how that pans out. One change I would love to see is not to play the same team twice in the same week.”

Schreiber is a fan of divisional play in baseball, but since only 13 schools sponsor the sport (Wisconsin doesn’t have a program) there were too many challenges. The conference season will still last nine weeks, with each team playing eight opponents.

“Playing an equal number of games got mathematically tricky. I still prefer to stay in divisions but I got outvoted,” Schreiber said.

One proposal would’ve sent the top six teams in the standings to the conference tournament and the final two selections based on RPI strength, but it was tabled. The Big Ten expanded the field to eight this year and will keep the format in 2015.

“What we were trying to do was establish two ways of getting in the Big Ten tournament — your conference record and trying to get guys to play good RPI schedules and reward them for doing so,” Schreiber said.

In women’s soccer, the RPI impact forced the conference coaches to rethink a round-robin schedule. The RPI is one factor that is used to determine selection into the NCAA tournament.

“There’s some belief once you get into conference play it’s a zero-sum game — whenever someone benefits, someone is hurt once you’re strictly playing within your conference,” Klatte said. “Playing six or seven nonconference games wasn’t going to give everyone a big enough opportunity and big enough pool of teams to build the strength going into conference play.”

Purdue is hosting the women’s soccer tournament this season, featuring the top eight seeds. The number will remain at eight, despite the addition of two teams.

“With the rigors of playing the games at the end of the season prior to the NCAA, people did not look at adding more conference tournament games as a plus,” Klatte said. “If we had stayed at playing everyone within the conference, there’s probably less of a need to play a conference tournament.”

Golf isn’t impacted as much as other sports because a 14-team tournament is still fewer than the NCAA Championships. One event that might be altered is the men’s Big Ten Match Play Championship in February.

Last year, all 12 teams participated over two days in Bradenton, Fla. Squeezing 14 teams into the current format has more obstacles.

“Right now, they’re backed up against daylight,” said Devon Brouse, who is Purdue’s Director of Golf Operations and serves as the women’s head coach. “Coaches have been willing to commit to two days for match play but not three. It compresses the competition and you have no margin for error. You can’t have a rain delay. One year, we had a smoke delay.”

Brouse said reducing the field is probably the best option, but establishing the criteria will be another debate.

“You might see a migration of a more select field, maybe only the top 10 ranked teams from the Big Ten or the teams that qualified (for the NCAA) the year before. I don’t know what the right formula is, but there has to be some change in that format,” he said. “There’s talk of live coverage on (BTN) and that’s a big deal to get live coverage in our sport.”

HEAD TO HEAD

Maryland sponsors 19 sports, but has five that Purdue doesn’t offer: Men’s and women’s lacrosse, men’s soccer, field hockey and women’s gymnastics.